Karol Lagodzki
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klagodzki.bsky.social
Karol Lagodzki
@klagodzki.bsky.social
1.3K followers 100 following 76 posts
#Author. Words in Invisible City, Storm Cellar, elsewhere. Controlled Conversations, a novel, finalist for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award. In love with a painter. Father of strange children. He/him. Next novel seeking literary representation.
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klagodzki.bsky.social
You mean made me cry because it was so bad? Yesterday. Deleted.
October 22, 2025 at 10:02 PM
klagodzki.bsky.social
My wife says the same thing about me 🤣
October 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM
klagodzki.bsky.social
What’s frightening is that an average person misses 4 of these specific questions, including what fossil fuels are.
September 6, 2025 at 12:10 PM
klagodzki.bsky.social
Absolutely mesmerizing. I can't stop staring at it.
August 18, 2025 at 7:53 PM
klagodzki.bsky.social
This sucks. I'm sorry you're going through it. A piece of pie is the least the universe owes you.
July 29, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Karol Lagodzki
hararereview.bsky.social
Also inside, on p27: from me about The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura x Tierno Monénembo, Ryan Chamberlain (tr.), which is out now from @schaffnerpress.bsky.social.

Thanks to @laurencerand.com for the review copy!

#Guinea
REVIEW JACQUELINE NYATHI THE LIVES AND DEATHS OF VERONIQUE BANGOURA A NOVEL BY TIERNO MONÉNEMBO TRANSLATED BY RYAN CHAMBERLAIN To live, to die and to tell Should we protect the world from our pain, and our pain from the world, or share it far and wide? IN TRANSLATION, the idiomatic expressions and mannerisms of the original language can sometimes interrupt the reader's flow. But if that happens in the first pages of Tierno Monénembo's new novel, keep going. The tale of the woman who will be known as Véronique Bangoura is enthralling. On one of her daily jaunts with her wheelchair-using husband Véronique meets Madame Corre, who recognises the language she speaks as originating from Guinea. Madame Corre wants Véronique to tell her story- why she's in Paris and how she came to be (as Madame Corre mistakenly believes) a personal care assistant to the man in the wheelchair. Madame Corre, you see, has her own painful history to share, and suspects Véronique does too. From this shared place ofpain the women bond and come to understand one another across their seeming divide. The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura weaves its story around the atrocities that happened in Guinea under Sékou Touré from 1956 to 1982. In the moving retelling of of Touré's brutality through the lives (and many deaths) of Véronique and Madame Corre, Monénembo brings what would otherwise be a distant news story and past history to the present experience of the reader. Once any initial struggle with style in translation passes, the rhythm of this work begins to resonate, along with the singular voice of Véronique - an outstanding character who has survived a complicated past and escaped it through a series of unlikely events.
July 26, 2025 at 4:26 AM
klagodzki.bsky.social
True. But lots of people will get hurt before sanity returns, and there is no satisfaction in I-told-you-sos even if we’re still here then.
July 9, 2025 at 1:40 PM